ning of the same day, the 19th of April, 1776. In spite of the evasions and vacillations of the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor, three days after you poured your hasty levies of militia, a large detachment, into Massachusetts. In the same year you raised and had in service 1200 regular troops. You afterwards raised three state regiments, and this from a population of about 50,000 souls-an astonishing fact! According to Gibbon, the calculation confirmed by the experience of all ages, is that a community that sends into the field more than the one hundredth part of its population, will' soon perish from exhaustion. You did vastly more than this-voluntarily more than Bonaparte in his severest conscription ever dared demand. The truth is, your spirit was high and warm, your generosity reckless, your soaring, romantic. It is one of the few evils amidst the innumerable blessings of a confederacy, composed of states of unequal territory and population that the small must from the nature of things, contribute more in proportion than the larger state; it can be more easily congregated and excited. The flashes of sentiment are conducted from one to another, and to the whole with electric celerity. The citizens are prompt in the performance of what they promptly resolve. They bear the burden, they fight the battle, they shout the victory, and returning from its well fought field, descry the tardy contingents of larger and perhaps wiser states, plodding their cautious way to see, to admire and perchance to envy, what has been done. You took high ground by your members in Congress, as to the mode of conducting the war. You endeavored to give it a naval cast. Distinguished for your commercial marine, and for the enterprize and intrepidity of your mariners, you felt the necessity and urged the expediency of naval military exertion. The first little fleet, the germ, the nautilus of our present naval character and fame, was commanded by a native Rhode-Islander, Commodore Esek Hopkins, who surprised New Providence, captured the governor, lieutenant governor and other officers of the crown, seized a hundred pieces of cannon, and carried off all the munitions of war from the island. The island was occupied for weeks, and with what is and I hope ever will be the characteristic of American and Rhode-Island commanders, with a most scrupulous respect for private property and individual feeling. My humble attempt, hitherto, has been that of suggesting the general national spirit that led to, and effected, our revolution, and the particular, but efficient share that, from institution, character and pre-disposition, Rhode-Island contributed to the main design. This last attempt, will be blamed, as fostering a delusive vanity, and deceptive selfesteem. But if individuals have a natural right to feel a generous consciousness of a pure and virtuous ancestry-if the Romans placed in the vestibules of their houses, the statues of their progenitors, that they might, by beholding them as they passed, be excited to a rivalry of their excellence, surely you as a state, have a peculiar and indubitable right, to indulge in a state pride. It is justified from the purified and pious motives which impelled to your primary institution, as a body politic, and which conducted, continued, and upheld you in the same direction, through all your difficulties, dangers, and distresses, through good report and evil report, even unto the end. That, which in the individual is a selfish or absurd vanity, diffused, mitigated, and generalized by a community, is patriotism-the cement of union-the spring of virtuous emulation -the nurse of lofty thoughts, and the impulse of heroic deeds. Rhode-Island has had as yet no historian; of our heroes and sages it may indeed be said "they had no poet, and they died." 193 THE BATTLE OF BENNINGTON BY THOMAS P. RODMAN. Up through a cloudy sky, the sun Was buffeting his way, On such a morn as ushers in A sultry August day. Hot was the air-and hotter yet Men's thoughts within them grew : They Britons, Hessians, Tories saw— They saw their homesteads too. They thought of all their country's wrongs, They thought of noble lives Poured out in battle with her foes, They thought upon their wives, Their children and their aged sires, And these deep thoughts made hallowed ground Their leader was a brave old man, A man of earnest will; His very presence was a host He'd fought at Bunker Hill. A living monument he stood Of deeds that shed a fadeless light On his own deathless name. Of Charlestown's flames, of Warren's blood, His presence told the tale, It made each hero's heart beat high Though lip and cheek grew pale ; And on the past shed glory. Who were those men, their leader who? The men were Berkshire yeomanry, Wollamsac wanders by the spot Where they that morning stood; Then rolled the war cloud o'er the stream, The waves were tinged with blood; And the near hills that dark cloud girt And fires like lightning flashed, And shrieks and groans like howling blasts Rose as the bayonets clashed. |